Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Far east on Lake Erie, in a hastily fabricated shipyard near the New York town of Buffalo, a feverish effort was being made to build an American fleet to put on Lake Erie and break the British navy’s control of that body of water. Though the United States had a respectable sea navy, it could not be brought up to Lake Erie because of Niagara Falls, so it had become necessary to build a little navy here. Last fall in a daring night raid, some American officers had boarded and captured a moored British warship, the Caledonia, which would be the nucleus of the new fleet. When the new vessels were ready, they were to be put under the command of a cocky young naval officer named Oliver Hazard Perry, whose job it would be to challenge British supremacy on the lake. It was a desperate and audacious plan. But Harrison had met young Perry and had seen in him a man very similar to what he himself had been at the age of twenty-seven. So he expected something to come of that. If the Royal Navy could be blockaded or sunk, it would be much harder for the British to besiege Fort Meigs. But the timing of any help from that quarter could only be guessed at. It could be weeks, or months, or with bad luck, never.

  The other assistance was much more imminent, and it would be coming from the other direction. It was a brigade of frontier militiamen under the command of General Green Clay. It would be marching up through western Ohio and boating down the Maumee any day now to reinforce Harrison at Fort Meigs. Harrison had meant to stand fast in his fort until Clay’s arrival before setting out to attack Detroit and Canada.

  But he had not expected his wait to be under the muzzles of so many big British guns. So now as he prowled in underground rooms with the smell of raw earth in his nostrils, he wished with all his might for the arrival of those reinforcements. When they come down, he vowed to himself, the first job they’ll get will be to put those damned big guns out of order.

  And to keep his mind off worrying about the Damocles’ sword hanging over him, he began planning a way to attack the British batteries across the river. Surely there must be an awful number of Tecumseh’s Indians between here and those batteries.

  I wish Clay were here now, he thought. Wouldn’t it be a splendid thing to spike those guns before they can even fire a shot at us!

  BEFORE DAWN, TECUMSEH MOUNTED HIS BLACK HORSE AND rode out of the woods where his warriors had slept on their laying poles. They were all awake now. They were crowding toward the edge of the woods nearest the fort, ready to watch the spectacle and to rush the fort whenever they got the word to do so.

  In the gray half-light Tecumseh waded his horse through the Maumee at a shallows where a flaky rock island shaped like a bison’s head divided the stream. Then he rode across a grassy lowland and up the bluff to the site of the big British guns. The British sentries saluted him. The sky in the east was now streaked with the color of pumpkin, and the red coats of the artillery men looked purple as they moved and carried things around the cannons. The regimental flag hung on its pole above the battery, silhouetted against the sky. There were five huge, earth-and-log gun emplacements, and the black muzzles poked out over them, aimed at Fort Meigs.

  Procter now came up the artillery road from old Fort Miami, riding with a bodyguard of dragoons. He dismounted, handed his horse’s reins to a dragoon, and said to Tecumseh, “My ’goons here will take your horse back down a way if you like. It’s going to be rather noisy up here for a beastie that’s not used to it.”

  “Good, Procter,” Tecumseh said. He dismounted and gave a trooper the reins. Procter’s face was scarcely visible in the dim light, but his voice was peevish now as he voiced an ongoing grievance:

  “I do wish, Chief, that you would address me as ‘General Procter,’ just as a token of respect.” He had been promoted to general when he was put in charge of operations in this theater, and it meant a lot to him. Tecumseh replied simply:

  “I respected Brock. He did not complain that I called him ‘Brock.’ It was his name. Is not yours Procter?”

  Procter hissed a sigh and turned away to talk to the artillery officers. Procter was well aware that Tecumseh had no respect for him, but he always had to humor this haughty chief. If it weren’t for Tecumseh’s Indians, he knew, the Americans could overrun Upper Canada in a week. Procter had a wife and an ailing daughter and a great many valuable possessions in his house in Amherstburg, and he was desperately worried all the time about some kind of a quick rout that would leave them undefended in the face of the Americans. That was why he had agreed to come out with Tecumseh on this offensive into Ohio and committed so many troops and guns to it. If they could pound Harrison’s army into the ground here, Procter’s family and treasures would be that much more secure in Amherstburg—and his reputation in London.

  It was a little lighter when Procter came back to Tecumseh. He said, “The artillery officers have offered you and me the honor of shooting the first rounds from the big guns. Would you care to?”

  Tecumseh liked most of the British officers except Procter and observed as much of their protocol as he could. But the sight of the great black metal monstrosities repelled him. They seemed to give off bad medicine, and he did not want to touch them. They were just not for the use of a red man, he felt, and he did not know how to express this to Procter. So he said, “Tell them Tecumseh thanks them for this honor, but the ears of a red man cannot stand so great a noise. Tell them Tecumseh must have both hands over his ears when he stands this close to a shooting big cannon.”

  Smirking, Procter turned and went back to the guns and spoke to the artillery commander. “The chief’s afraid to,” he said.

  “Afraid to! Ha! I doubt he said that!” Procter gave the officer a hard look, and the officer added, “Sir.”

  “Well, then, Major, if you think it’s quite light enough to make out your targets, you may begin firing.”

  “Yes, sir. You’ll do the honor of touching the first match, sir?”

  Procter backed off. He himself had always been scared of cannon. He always imagined they would explode at the breech. “Ahmmm … I wouldn’t want to slight the chief,” he said. He walked back a way and put his fat hands over his ears.

  “I thought the general and the chief were going to touch off the first rounds,” said a lieutenant.

  “I guess they’re scared to,” the major replied.

  “Well, ’tis our job,” said the lieutenant. “Would you care to do the honors, sir?” The lieutenant gave the major the match and then covered his own ears, as did the cannoneers standing about. Tecumseh saw them do it and pressed his palms over his ears.

  The burning match in the major’s hand was the only spark of warm light in the gray-green dawn, except for the breakfast cookfires now twinkling down in the distant fort. A few birds were starting to twitter in the dark woods behind the battery. Standing beside the massive breech with his feet together as if at attention, the major put the match to the touchhole.

  The huge cannon lurched, spurted a tongue of yellow fire and sparks and thick smoke thirty feet long, and cracked open the stillness of the spring morning. Tecumseh felt the ground buck and felt as if he had been struck on the head. The roar rolled over the valley and echoed back, leaving his ears ringing. An instant later the other twenty-four-pounder blasted. Both guns stood smoking under the dust their impact had raised, and then geysers of dirt and debris leaped up inside the distant fort. Even before the sound of their impact could come back, the rest of the British artillery was thundering, flashing smoke and fire and stirring up dust, and the cannoneers were moving to swab and reload the big guns. Now through the ringing in his head and between the thunderclaps of the other cannons, Tecumseh could hear his warriors howling with amazement and delight on the far side of the river.

  His head felt as if it were being pounded with a club, and he felt like screaming himself to shut out the overpowering noise.

  Now he could hear, too, filtering up through the distance, the shouts of the white soldiers in the fort where the great iron balls were hitting. He thought they must be dying over there by the
dozens already, and he felt a little pity for them in their helplessness. But he clenched his jaw and thought:

  You should have stayed out of our land.

  And by the time the sun was coming up on the horizon and sparkling on the Maumee, and Tecumseh was riding back down to rejoin his warriors, cannon smoke was puffing out of the palisade of the fort as the Americans fired back. Tecumseh looked backward and saw the top fall out of a poplar tree a few hundred feet short of the British batteries. As he rode into the river, the thundering went on, and he could hear the bleating of a bugle from inside the fort, a sound like a child crying in a thunderstorm. This cannonade was a noise that crushed the soul, and he hoped it would not have to go on very long. Surely most of the Americans would be dead by the middle of the day, and Harrison would have to surrender.

  BUT THOUGH THE THUNDER AND THE SMOKE WENT ON ALL day, no flag of surrender rose in the fort. From their coverts in the woods around the fort, the Indians could watch bits of earth and splinters fly up and watch the two-bang balls crack open with an orange flash and hear the shrapnel raining in the trees and sometimes see a piece of blockhouse roof fly into pieces. But the Americans in the fort were not all dead yet, even in the late afternoon; they still came out onto their cannon platforms and fired a few rounds toward the British batteries across the river, or aimed a load of grapeshot into the woods where the Indians were, and even appeared on the palisades with their long rifles once in a while and tried to shoot Indians. When they showed themselves like that, the Indians would shower them with musket fire, and they killed a few. Many of the warriors were Sioux and Chippewa, who had come a long way after the earthquake to fight for Tecumseh. But he knew they would tire of this kind of fighting before long. After a while the spectacle of the shelling would get tiresome, and their heads were already starting to hurt from the noise. Few warriors were willing to lie inactive within range of enemy fire and wait for something to happen. If they saw no opportunity for a quick triumph, they grew restless. He knew he would have to spend time with them now and then and assure them of victory, keep them eager for a chance to do something glorious. Procter had recommended that the artillery should pound the fort for a long time and kill most of the Americans and break down some walls and blow up some American cannons before the warriors and troops should rush the walls.

  Late in the afternoon a new kind of sound erupted amid the cannon thunder. It was a sort of popping sound, coming from beyond the clearing south of the fort. Smoke would rise from there, then there would be the pop, and after a moment there would be a whistling sound and an explosion in the fort. Tecumseh knew what it was. The mortar batteries had been finished over there and were lobbing bombshells into the fort from that angle. Tecumseh explained it to his warriors, tossing a rock high to show how it would fall on something hidden on the other side of a log, and it kept them entertained for the rest of the day.

  WHEN THE MORTAR SHELLS STARTED FALLING RIGHT INTO the trenches, Harrison ascertained where they were coming from, and that evening his soldiers began digging again. This time they dug ditches and piled up traverses that ran from north to south, at right angles to the long trenches, and dug more rooms.

  Never, Harrison thought, had any body of men endured such a bombardment so well. All day the fort had been churned and shaken; all day the air had been full of cannonballs and geysers of dirt and flying splinters and shrapnel; all day the troops had hidden in the underground rooms or crouched in the trenches with dirt raining on their hats and dust sifting down on their shoulders. Now and then a man would crumple with a piece of shrapnel in him or an eye blown out or a face full of oak splinters; sometimes two or three men would be buried alive under a ton of collapsing dirt. But instead of the hundreds of dead that could have been expected after such a day, there were only a couple of dozen dead and wounded. While the shovels chunked in the ditches to repair fortifications, there was also the digging of graves in another part of the compound.

  The troops were not as disheartened as might have been expected. Many of them were half-drunk. Borrowing from his studies of past bombardments, Harrison had employed a sporting method used during sieges of the Revolution: he had authorized the issue of a shot of whiskey to each man who turned a reusable British cannonball in to the magazine. A soldier would come in, grinning, covered with dirt, carrying a cannonball he had picked up or dug from the ground, trade it for a shot of whiskey, and go back to the trenches, and soon the ball would be loaded into an American cannon of the same caliber and sent on its way back toward the British guns. One man had staggered in so often that he was joshed by the magazine keeper about catching them in midair.

  “Naw, I would catch ’em if I could see ’em,” he drawled. “But I have ran down a couple afore they stopped rollin’.”

  THE BARRAGE STARTED AGAIN AT DAWN OF THE SECOND DAY, and the British officers kept watching for the truce flag that never went up. The Indians surrounding the fort on the east, south, and west grew still more restless in their coverts, and only Tecumseh’s persuasion could keep some of the small bands from leaving to go back to Canada or to their homes. They were beginning to doubt the power of cannon; though the noise was as impressive as ever, they were beginning to suspect that most of the damage the cannon could do was to ears.

  Some of Tecumseh’s scouts were bold enough, or bored enough, to risk the occasional sprays of grapeshot and climb high into the big sycamores beside the creek and look and snipe at the soldiers inside the fort. When they came down they described the ditches and dirt walls and told Tecumseh that they had seen hardly any soldiers—just shells exploding and dirt flying and rows of tents all in shreds. Tecumseh took that news to Procter. It explained why the soldiers in the fort had not surrendered yet. The news seemed both to annoy and frighten Procter. Tecumseh could almost read his thoughts. Procter had been here for days on American soil, and he was sure that more Americans would be coming from somewhere soon—he had often expressed a worry about reinforcements—and the reduction of the fort was apparently going to take much longer than he had expected.

  “My stupid American enemy is smarter than you said,” Tecumseh remarked.

  Procter raised his head and sniffed.

  WHEN STILL ANOTHER DAY OF BOMBARDMENT FAILED TO make the Americans hoist a white flag, Procter decided to send down a demand for surrender. He stopped the cannonade and raised a truce flag, and in the ringing silence after the din, he briefed a trim young Redcoat major on what to say to Harrison.

  “I too have a message for Harrison,” Tecumseh said. “Give me one of your writing soldiers to write it on paper.” And he dictated:

  I have with me 800 braves. You have many in your hiding place. Come out with them and give me battle. You talked like a brave when we met at Vincennes, and I respected you, but now you hide behind logs and in the earth, like a groundhog. Give me your answer.

  Tecumseh

  When the major came back he reported that Harrison had refused to surrender and had implied a readiness to fight to the end. Procter clenched his jaw and ordered the batteries to resume their fire. He went back to his headquarters at Fort Miami, after cautioning Tecumseh to keep scouts far out to watch for the approach of American reinforcements.

  Tecumseh himself took a large band of scouts out around the countryside the next day, convinced that the monstrous shelling would have no results against the burrowing Americans. His party rode far in a circuit to check the Sandusky road to the south, then swung up toward the Maumee to watch the river and the western road. As they passed through the cleared fields and farms, the roar of the barrage grew fainter behind them, finally sounding like distant thunder. The countryside was peaceful and fresh with spring foliage. New corn was scarcely knee-high in the fields. To ride through these sunny fields with his bands of scouts reminded him of his journeys to the site of old Chillicothe in the years before the war. He thought of the Galloways, who farmed like this in the old Shawnee lands. He thought of their goodness, then of the evils Harrison had
wrought, and he wondered at the ways of the white race. Even Harrison seemed to believe that what he was doing was right. Surely Harrison believed himself to be a righteous man.

  The warriors had been fasting in battle, and they were very hungry now, but of course there was no game in all this settled land. Then Thick Water rode up beside Tecumseh and pointed toward a plowed field. Near its far edge was a white boy of ten or twelve years, standing as if petrified, holding the handles of a plow hooked to a pair of oxen. He was looking at the Indians. “Beef,” said Thick Water, pulling his tomahawk from his waistband. The other warriors were grinning, looking at the oxen.

  Tecumseh held up his hand. He looked at the boy and thought of Gal-lo-weh’s sons, who had been about that age when he had first seen them, working in their fields. “No harm to the boy,” he said, and led his scouts into the field.

  The boy was too terrified to move. He stood, face pale, looking at the painted warriors all around him. In the distance the guns were still thundering under a cloud of gray smoke. Nearby a bluebird was singing. Tecumseh dismounted and smiled at the boy.

  “I must have those ox,” he said in English. “My young men are most hungry. I must have the beef for them.”

  It was a while before the boy could speak. Then he whimpered that if they took the oxen, his family would be ruined. He said his father was very sick, and that without the oxen to plow with, his family would die.

  “I could take them, as we are at war with your country,” Tecumseh said. “But I do not make war on a family. I will pay you a hundred dollar for these ox. They are not worth so much. You can buy more ox for your sick father.”

  He had Billy Caldwell write an order for one hundred dollars for the beasts, signed it, and told the boy he could take it to Colonel Elliott, the British Indian agent at Fort Miami, who would give him the dollars. “Show the Redcoats my name on the paper, and they will let you in the fort.” Having no inclination to protest, the boy took the paper and ran.